


To See Beyond the White Alders

by Chromat1cs



Series: Deepwood Wreathing [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Muggle, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Baron Sirius Black, Boot Worship, Cock Tease, Coming In Pants, Forests, Hunters & Hunting, I made it into a series because hey life is short make your PWP emotional amirite, Is anyone really surprised, Jealousy, M/M, Magical Realism, Mutual Pining, Pining, Pretty mild though, Prostitution, Rentboy Remus Lupin, Rentboys, Teasing, Winter, really took you unawares with that one, said nobody ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 20:01:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17086811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Lord Black has a winter lodge for those spells of seasonal gloom when time away from the city is the only cure for his restlessness. For the first time, he’s a companion to bring with him.





	To See Beyond the White Alders

****_23 December, 1887_

The hansom’s frame creaks with muted jangling at every shift over the frozen ground outside while the coal grate at the floor works its hardest to fill the air with anything more than a paltry scrap of warmth. Late December, this slice of time looming ahead between Christmastide and the new year, a handful of dead days that are at once too short and endless, has lashed the earth with a unique cold unfelt in what seems like an eternity since last winter.

“Do you want for anything?” Murmured out on a faint plume of steam, Sirius adjusts his seat on the cushion beneath him while he eyes the man across from him carefully. He feels as though he’s filling air unnecessarily for the ease of relative silence the last four-odd hours of travel have held, but Sirius is compelled to ask anyways. Remus stares back with mild amusement in those maddening eyes of his and shakes his head.

“No, thank you. The blanket was all, I believe I’m met.” As if in punctuation he wriggles his shoulders slightly beneath the dyed red wool draped over and around him like a mantle, burrowing so that it rucks up the hair just barely curling at his collar, and gives Sirius a small smile that twists violently at Sirius’ resolve. _I will not fuck him in the carriage, I will not bloody fuck him in the carriage._ Peter is a fine valet who doesn’t ask questions, but Sirius can’t imagine the disaster of having to explain him the dishevelment of being found trousers-down with Remus enthusiastically bent over his seat when, with Sirius’ unique lack of luck, they inevitably arrive at the Colchester lodge before he’s a chance to finish properly.

 _And you’re absolutely sure you would be alright to come away from the city?_ Sirius’ own voice echoes in his memory as he looks sideways out the frost-crusted window, snow falling in huge matted flakes to blur even the middle-distance of the countryside peeling out around the road. He had proposed the journey a month ago, abed, sharing one of Remus’ strong cheroots with the covers twisted in spent chaos around their bodies. Sirius had let his refractory thoughts wander to his twice-yearly journey out to the countryside in Essex, and suddenly the thought of being very far away from Remus for more than several days had struck him like a charging boar. He had asked, and Remus had assented easily; _Whyever would I pass up a fortnight away from this fucking tomb, with an advance payment alongside? I hate Christmastide anyways. Pass the smoke,_ the yawned reply, wide, relaxed, vaguely feline in his uncaring nakedness as Remus stretched before reaching for his turn with the cigarette, and Sirius hadn’t the care nor the muster to remind the rent boy he hadn’t proposed any sort of payment yet.

But it’s only fair Remus gets paid. They’ve maintained an exceedingly robust exchange between the two of them for the past four months, twice weekly, moving from Sirius’ study up to his own quarters after the first three nights and, more recently, out to trustworthy clubs where Sirius can count on the utmost discretion of staff when they serve wine and fare to him—along with the young man who arrives after Sirius by a circuitous route and yet always shares his table. Remus is enchanting in the same manner as a shattered window with all the right portentous allure, letting gusts of his air into a room where it should not be by many laws of nature and throwing glittering candlelight in hypnotizing spangles from all his raw edges. Sirius is only glad his estate is doing well enough to maintain this new habit, this mad attachment to a man who refuses to share much of himself beyond his body and a few scraps of himself beneath the surface: he hails from Kent, he has a vast knowledge of literature, a palate for finer wines, and regulars in most corners of London with an extensive network of unnamed johns through Mayfair in particular.

Were his father still alive, Sirius would have to be judicious about embezzling Remus’ fees each month. As it stands, he takes dark and rueful glee in carefully penning the line item _Additional estate upkeep_ into his ledgers.

“Have you an agenda once we arrive?”

Sirius looks away from the swirling white, pulled from his thoughts, and over at Remus’ question to meet his eyes again and nod vaguely to himself. “I’ll need to take stock of the storage and survey the grounds at some point, but foremost I need to set the hearths and get the cottage warm enough for lodging.”

“Will your valet be staying with us then?”

A tremor of hope flutters past in Remus’ irises through the bare dim of their enclosure, a ripple in an earthen reflecting pool, and Sirius can’t help the small and righteous smile that tugs at his lips. “No. I see to this residence on my own, it was my first inheritance and I own the deed in full. It’s compact enough that it doesn’t need staffing. And I quite enjoy the drudgery of it when I’m here.”

Remus twins the grin back to Sirius, accidentally nova-bright, and leans forward ever so slightly, tantalizing and knowing exactly the provocation he stirs beneath his bundle of woolen nesting against the cold. “And _now_ it becomes clear why you’ve brought me along. Here I thought I was only going to languish on a window seat like some lordling’s bird, sighing at the snow, without an ounce of fucking privacy between us.”

Sirius has thought before, more often than he cares to admit to himself, on the reality of Remus going with other men. It isn’t a reality that particularly bothers him—Sirius Black is, after all, rational and business-minded by his own right and could never fault another for seizing entrepreneurial spirit by the lapels and using it as one sees fit for good, honest earnings. But there’s something that lights up in Sirius’ belly, deep and dark-red and threateningly delicious, at the thought of having Remus to himself for two weeks. He doesn’t _own_ the man, it just feels like a rich sort of victory. Sirius grasps the well-worn folds of Remus’ scarf and draws him near across the gap in their seats, almost at his lips but not quite there. “There will be much of many things between us out here,” he murmurs, nearly tasting the flush that rises under Remus’ golden skin that Sirius knows by right is twinned arousal against the rouge of chill winter.

“Whatever will I do when I don’t have to scarper afterwards?” Remus’ speech puffs warmth against Sirius’ lips and it almost hurts to meet his gaze, golden as sin and summer, as Sirius’ heart flexes around the thoughts of staying entwined with that expert body for longer than several minutes before unfolding reluctantly to fetch a coin purse as Remus shuffles back into his shed clothing.

His pulse ticks higher in his throat at the fantasy of true intimacy. “That remains entirely up to you. I assure you the sheets are very warm.” They still aren’t kissing, but the mimicry of it that their breath is causing has Sirius’ blood stirring madly.

“And who’s to say we’ll be taking our pleasure in your bed each time?” Remus’ words are bold as Eris’ low-hanging apples, a side of himself he’s shown since the outset that drives Sirius’ heart wild for it, and Sirius isn’t able to even draw breath before Remus seals his chilled lips to warm them in shared heat.

Sirius digs his fingers into the nape of Remus’ hair as the rent boy licks into his mouth almost immediately. Sirius has every intention of at least drawing Remus into his lap to deepen the kiss, not quite fucking him but certainly working him up for it, before the carriage lurches with the slowing drag of coming to a stop. Remus makes a sound of resistance when Sirius draws back and searches his face automatically, desperately, drinking in the slopes of Remus’ painterly features, _Raphael would have murdered the pope for a moment with you._ “Alright?”

“Setting your hearths can wait,” Remus hisses, darting forward again to nip Sirius’ bottom lip with Puck’s own surety before he shuffles himself back into his blanket. The sound of Peter unseating at the head of the carriage and tromping around to the door rustles in from outside, but Sirius’ attention is fastened to Remus with an owlish inability to move from the space where Remus has left him hanging, asmolder, cherry-bright with his feelings half-bare. Remus’ eyes flicker to the door when Peter coughs, and whether it’s with legitimate fustiness or propriety is anyone’s guess. “The moment he leaves us, you’re _mine.”_

Sirius shudders with sweetest anticipation and lands the rent boy with a look he hopes is promising, easing himself upright and straightening his greatcoat just as the right-side door creaks open to a madness of flurrying white and Peter’s ruddy face peering in. “Essex awaits, milord. Sir.” To his credit, Peter is able to meet Remus’ eyes after nodding at to each man in kind for a slice longer than the normal three half-seconds he can manage—bless the poor man, he can put aside his thoughts on Sirius’ private life for the sake of employment, but it seems more difficult for Peter to draw up his courage when that privacy is the entirety of one’s _own_ employment.

“Thank you kindly, Peter.” Sirius gestures for Remus to take his exit first as Peter holds the carriage door open, not extending a hand as he would for a lady for the three of them understand quite well the unsaid notion of a man’s pride. Remus steps down from the coach with sure steps and rangy grace, his blanket still bundled at his shoulders like a centurion’s cape, and surveys the surrounding countryside in swaths of white as snowflakes immediately catch at the edges of his hat to garland him with a ghosting of frozen laurels, the dead ground’s champion in his contrasting shades of vigorous life.

“I’ll leave a horse for you, unless you’ll be needing two, milord?” Peter waits on Sirius as he unfolds himself from the carriage, and the baron winces with the creaking in his joints to bend slightly at several angles and wake up his cramped limbs. He takes his time hoisting the rucksack folded full of several days’-worth of clothing for both himself and Remus from the luggage rack— _I find it sweet you assume we’ll need much in the way of clothes,_ had been the rent boy’s joke if Sirius is recalling that conversation properly—and slings it over his shoulder before looking over at his valet. Peter’s pale eyes are perfectly cordial with a hint of floundering, the sort of look that says _I’m horribly out of my depth with whomever this man thinks he is so I’m looking at you by default,_ and Sirius nods at the dappled grey mare that leads the trio yoked to the carriage as he rustles his hands into his pockets for the calfskin gloves folded within.

“Just the one, thank you. Are you sure you’re alright to travel back this evening with such heavy snowfall?” Sirius enjoys a twinge of vinegar at that when he feels Remus whip a cutting glance over at him, stiletto-sharp, before the young man catches himself and turns tightly back to looking off into the trees. Sirius isn’t often one for petulant wiles, but occasionally he takes pleasure in prodding at the fiery sparks beneath Remus’ cool exterior.

“Aye,” Peter says over his shoulder with a grunt to begin unfastening the mare’s harness. The geldings at her flanks whicker softly to paw at the snow, knowing Peter as one who often brings the horses apple cores and extra feed when he brushes them down at the London estate, and Peter pats them each with absent fondness. “If I don’t leave before dark, I’m afraid the snow will be too deep. You may well wake with it up to your knees, milord, make sure you’re warm. I’d not like to arrive to fetch you back come January and find you frozen, eh?” Pete hitches the mare’s empty harness to the rod of the yoke and leads her round to Sirius, her calm black eyes reflecting the edge of the woods like huge, dark pearls. The lodge in the distance bends along the curve beneath her lashes, and Sirius pets absently at the mare’s nose as she snorts appreciatively.

“Worry not,” Sirius assures his valet with clap on the shoulder. He takes the reins from Peter’s hand and doesn’t miss the way Peter glances furtively over at Remus, a way’s apart from them as he shuffles the pure fluff of fresh snow idly over the polished riding boots he’d gotten new last month from one client or another. Sirius sighs to himself and grips Peter’s coat fraternally where his gloves fingers rest—perhaps with an edge of warning, _Is that what that feeling is?_ Possession, perhaps; _Look not on my companion as though he carries plague, messire, it doesn’t suit you._ He internally wags the vindication from his thoughts and tries at a wan grin. “There have been worse winters, and I find it necessary to have time away from the city regardless.”

“Of course. Be well, milord.” Peter doesn’t seem as though he entirely believes Sirius—it reflects in his eyes much like the mare’s, except flatter and with more mortal fear of something abstract behind his pupils, something distant and too complex to unravel in a clever conversational twist—and so Sirius decides to let it lie and parts with a nod and a handshake.

_Be that as it may. I’ve time to spend lost in another._

Sirius leaves Peter to reset the carriage for his journey back home and takes the mare by her reigns, chucking his tongue softly to bid her follow with those steady, heavy steps, before he starts toward the lodge with the fresh tug of eagerness between his lungs. The flakes piling down around the blessedly silent swath of woods hiss faintly as they fall, a-whisper with a spirit of calm purpose, and Sirius revels in the sensation of pinprick glass stillness so far away from anything he can find in the city. In such silence he hears Remus’ muffled footsteps picking his careful way along the road to catch up to him, crunching over in his long strides that Sirius has never had the luxury to watch in the city since the rent boy can only ever trail Sirius parallel on side-streets when they meet—Sirius turns, indulgent, to watch Remus walk toward him with the tails of his blanket whirling as they interrupt the swirling path of several spiral-down snowflakes. In a low voice when Remus is just a couple steps away, Sirius hums with approval. “You walk very proudly.”

Remus’ eyes take their turn in this litany of glittering stares to flash with approval, goldenrod, spun-silk thread passing through the needle’s eye of his pupils tightened amidst the wash of white smothering the landscape. The young man smiles and Sirius just hardly stays himself from inhaling the plume of steam acurl through his parted lips when Remus huffs a throaty laugh to himself. “And how else would you suppose I should? You’re paying me to fuck you for two full weeks, Lord Black, I lead a charmed life.”

To Sirius’ credit, he’s able to keep from drowning in Remus’ body for the entire span of time it takes to brush down his horse, board her for the night in the small east stable, and remove an entire boot-and-a-half after shutting the cottage door behind them. As he pulls aside the brushed-velvet coat underneath the red blanket, autumn red calling silently to the leaves long buried in the snow outside, and brands a searing kiss to Remus’ naked shoulder still flushed from the cold while the young man shudders with a ragged and spurring sound against the chill of Sirius’ nose, Sirius holds fast to the surety of kinetic pleasure that will fill this cottage with warmth far more virulent than hearthfires could ever hope to be.

—

The Colchester lodge is compact in a cozy sort of way, one of the oldest properties in the ancient Black estate relegated to last place on the list of anyone in the family’s desire to visit the properties since time immemorial. Of course this has meant that Sirius adores the place, sagging foundations and all. It’s been his in totality since his seventeenth birthday and he’s nursed the cottage up into something truly comfortable a far cry from the mold, termites, and horrible rat problem all persisting several years ago when he had first arrived, like a small bird with a broken wing fledged now into a lovely and sharp-witted creature worth keeping—rudimentary plumbing and boiler heating included. There aren’t nearly enough rooms for any staff and so he fends for himself out here, often in the snow and always in the quiet, able to forget the stiffness and starch of high society that tires him so deeply these days as he hunts and cooks over a simple stovetop and presses black coffee that tastes of solitude and something sharp that lives in his bones; that nameless energy, that boundless pressure of something far older than his insides have any right to be but there nonetheless, there since he was old enough to divine the vague sense of unbelonging in his blood, there amid the trees and silence and pack animals who wander the Essex woods. He feels it amplified here, and he can never be quite sure what that means.

Sirius lies awake for the better part of an hour that night, the coal and embers stoked to keep the bedroom steeped in a hazy, patchy warmth helped along by two layers of rich quilting and the man laying beside him. Remus sleeps with a stillness Sirius envies deeply and the baron supposes it’s a sign of either a clear conscience or a man very good at shrugging off his sins. Either would be a fine characteristic for a rent boy, able to flit from one place to the next collecting his coin, gifts, praise, attentions—Sirius had harbored a skittering thought for several days before departing that perhaps it was a mistake to bring Remus away for so long, perhaps he’ll draw ire from the other toffs who employ the young man, pulled away into his privacy, would they wonder where he’s gone? _Gideon’s a-sail to Portugal._ Does he have his own stand-in for this fortnight back in London, _Remus is a-canter to Colchester;_ would he have even told anyone he was away?

With a sniff of a sigh Sirius puts the thoughts out of his mind and turns onto his side, intent on chasing sleep in this warm burrow of a bed but arrested anew by the portrait beside him. Remus sleeps with his face pressed fastidiously into the pillow down, his brow relaxed and unlined by wit or preoccupation as it so often is when he’s awake. He has long eyelashes a shade or two darker than his hair that rest closed on his cheeks, his colors all muted by darkness but carved dramatically in shadow from the three-quarter moon peeking through a gap in the curtains across the room. Remus is marmoreal in the moment in a way that begs to be touched, his face all liquid curvature, ribboning lines, the shapes of him never stopping as though his creator were some mad genius who breathed him to life while in the throes of ecstatic enlightenment—Sirius coaxes a single wave of hair back from Remus’ forehead with a feather-light finger and tries not to feel his heart flex so dearly when the young man makes a quiet sound of contentment and burrows closer to his pillow with unconscious intent. Sirius hasn’t slept beside someone in years, hasn’t been able to safely share this suspended sort of peace with somebody who would have him for more than a handful of hours at a time in the secrecy of unseen corners. Sirius had never thought to ask Gideon to stay much longer past their completion, had never quite wanted to, and yet he’s felt the need to keep Remus close since the moment their mouths met.

_Perhaps that’s why kissing is such a sensitive thing._

Sirius leans in to replace his ginger touch with a chaste press of his lips on Remus’ forehead and feels the young man stir with another pleased little purr. The hand not splayed beneath Remus’ pillow sleepily finds Sirius’ waist beneath the covers and tugs at him in a soft, somnolent bid while Remus tucks his head down against Sirius’ chest in a motion that feels like the most natural thing in existence to slur a half-awake “C’mere.”

“Go back to sleep,” Sirius whispers into Remus’ mussed hair where he buries his nose for an indolent moment, smelling faintly of the clove oil with which he had stored the bedcovers to keep vermin out of the cottage closets alongside the scents of cardamom and light musk that Sirius has associated with Remus since the first time he could muster thoughts beyond primal desire as they fucked.

 “You hired me for this long just to _sleep?”_ Remus kisses Sirius’ clavicle with a muzzy twist of his lips and tongue, his murmur hazed and sleepy and yet still getting Sirius’ blood up like nothing he’s ever known before Remus. _Lord deliver me, this is the greatest sort of madness._

“Of course not—” Sirius pauses around his words to inhale sharply, sweetly, as Remus drops that hand past Sirius’ waist and finds him stiffening to begin petting him slowly. “I only—supposed you’d be tired from the journey. And earlier.”

“I’m a professional, my lord, regardless of our location.” _Fucking hell,_ Remus’ voice ringed with this smoke of exhaustion is a holy catastrophe on Sirius’ internal ramparts and it tears them down with a mighty and silent tremor borne from the wet heat of Remus’ tongue beginning to tease at Sirius’ nipple. “I’ll earn my keep as I see fit, thanks kindly.”

Sirius can hardly argue with good business. With the night looking on, he loses himself to this presence of glory in the only place that’s ever felt like any sort of real home at all.

—

_24 December, 1887_

“If you’re devoured by something awful, how should I notify your estate?”

Sirius looks up from the last piece of reassembling his freshly-cleaned hunting rifle and raises an eyebrow at Remus, who has draped himself over the high-backed armchair across from a roaring fire with his bare feet pointing toward the hearth, wearing nothing but one of Sirius’ furred dressing gowns. They had taken the morning at their leisure with the first weak rays of sunlight and Remus’ mouth on Sirius before the baron had even the chance to awaken completely, and Sirius was still inwardly reeling with a rare buoyancy that had persisted through their breakfast of salt beef and coffee fetched up from the frigid underground cellar. “I haven’t written you into my will, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Remus flashes him a saucy grin and twirls one of his ankles in slow, lazy circles where it hangs over the chair’s carved and upholstered arm. “You wouldn’t have been the first.” Sirius watches him for a moment, the lines of his body relaxed and unguarded in a way they’ve never been in London, and quirks his own smile.

“And whatever would you do with a testy mare and a lodge not worth much more than the sum of its yearly repairs?” Sirius fixes the rifle barrel shut with a satisfying snap. He runs an oilcloth across it once more, turning the gun over and around in his hands as he peers close to see if time or weather here has damaged it in any way. Sirius only ever keeps his dueling pistols in London with him, so it’s satisfying to know he can still prepare for a hunt quickly as ever.

“I’ve always thought I could run one hell of a brothel, Judas knows this county could use a good one.” Remus yawns around his words and burrows deeper into the collar of the dressing gown to make him look much like a maned lion settling in for a morning nap. Sirius snorts with good humor as he stands up to fetch his hunting whites from the cupboard where they stay folded through the greener seasons.

“For what would you use the horse then?”

“She charges double.”

Sirius splits with a laugh that takes him by surprise, snatched off-guard by Remus’ sharp wit as usual with stunning regularity. It barks out of him in uneven jags, the most undignified part of him since he’s been a boy that he habitually quells more often than not under the armor of austerity—but Jesu help him if Remus doesn’t get under that armor like a violent itch.

“It wasn’t _that_ funny,” Remus mutters eventually when Sirius calms himself with a cooling sigh after several seconds, but Sirius steals a glance at him and takes quiet pleasure in the victorious little smile secreted there upon his lips.

“It was hilarious. If I’m not back in two hours, you’re free to open your brothel.” Sirius steps into the fur-lined over-trousers and the boots that go with them, and Remus is watching him with an amused look by the time Sirius finishes buttoning the massive snow-colored parka.

“Have I also leave to peruse your books in the meantime, Father Christmas?”

“The naughty ones are on the top shelf.”

Sirius slings the rifle over his shoulder and pockets a sachet of extra bullets as Remus rises to skim the spines lining the bookshelf beside the fireplace. He dispels the thought of kissing the young man farewell—far too domestic, far too precious for an unsaid understanding between the two of them constructed over nearly five months of appointments carefully carried out as just physical _enough,_ just tender _enough_ to slake Sirius’ thirst but hold him away from such mad dreams as comfortable banter in the sitting room. It wouldn’t work.

The door shuts solidly behind Sirius and evelops him in the cold and comfortable silence of Colchester. It quit snowing sometime in the middle of the night, and the drifts left behind pass Sirius’ ankles when he steps down from the front path’s flagstones. The woods sweep out beyond the lodge in a wall of naked white alders with the single road stretching back west to London covered handsomely in fresh snow, Peter’s coach tracks erased as though Sirius had just appeared here, snapped into being in this lodge alongside Remus as if by magic. Sirius adores the silence and the way dry frigidity refreshes his lungs with the first deep breath of out-of-doors, plumes out in billowing steam when he slowly exhales. As he takes those crunching and quiet steps in his hunting boots, Sirius allows his body to re-fit itself to the wilderness. He pushes the furred hood up around his face, his hair whipping slightly in the breeze like black ink spreading through the grey mottle of what was once a wolf’s pelt, and sets himself to his first hunt of the winter that rings deeply of return in that ancient place beneath his bones. 

—

 _25 December, 1887_  

Christmas arrives with another bout of snowfall, gentler than the first day but just as persistent, and allows for a slow day of unfolding. Sirius Black has never been a terribly religious man—the pageantry of Anglican posturing has always grated on him, the hymns are all dull, and the idea that an infant could save the greater edges of mankind is less fairytale and more hopeless foundering to his loftier ideas of sanity. At the very least, the scenery is pretty.

Sirius had managed to fell a Roe deer on yesterday’s hunt, a smallish one with a few days of meat on its bones that Sirius can easily stretch out until the new year with other sundries dredged up from the cellar. Remus’ appetite is impressive as per his ability to keep up with the rich fare of Sirius’ clubs when they’ve met for a cursory dinners in London before returning to brass tacks at Sirius’ digs, and presently Sirius watches him polish off the second bowl of venison stew with an amused smile. Remus catches him watching and takes his time thumbing a spot of grease from the corner of his mouth.

“What.” It isn’t a question. Hardly anything Sirius has ever seen Remus do or heard him say is laced with any kind of unsurety.

“Nothing, only that you look very satisfied. More?” Sirius gestures with his own half-done second serving—the table settings here are another relegation of marginal exile from the Black estate, uncle Alphard’s favored china become as good as blighted the moment he died and left his entire estate to Sirius alone instead of spreading it evenly. Sirius had adored the man and still thanks his memory heartily for the periodic freedom from his city lifestyle, and yet the old man’s taste in florid accents leaves something to be desired. Remus, bless him, doesn’t comment on the antiquated styling of his dishes and only holds up a hand in deference. 

“No, thank you, but very well met, my lord. Who knew you to have all the skills befitting a proper lady alongside your manlier parts?”

“Careful there, you can’t get me into a corset that easily.”

Remus chuckles and polishes down the mug of wine in hand before pouring more, no care for the vintage although it might be one of the finer ones by accident—the label had crusted off on the cellar rack. “Am I not the first to try?”

Sirius snorts to himself and accepts the tall pour from the rest of the bottle that Remus offers him. “Preparatory school is a wondrous and confusing place, Remus.”

Remus grins at Sirius over the lip of his cup, eyes bright with mischief and something that looks strangely like affection, a tremor one half-step apart from lust, _Do you feel it as well then?_ That humming potential that crackles between them here alongside Sirius’ affinity for the solitude and the forest and the silence of the woods, is Remus as predisposed to looking inward as Sirius? The young man leans back on his bench and props his feet up on the opposite end of the too-long table between them, sized for at least two other people with a silly gap on the far end that quietly amplifies their privacy here. Remus looks proud and sated as a fox in the coop, back in shirtsleeves and trousers at some point while Sirius was out hunting, as well as those gleaming black riding boots of his. Sirius quells the ridiculous urge to lick their polished leather and focuses on a swallow of wine while Remus laces his fingers idly behind his head and watches Sirius with calm intent. “Tell me more of the wonders of a rich man’s life.”

Sirius sniffs to himself when defiance strikes its sudden flint in his belly, humming without meaning to, “One would think you know full well, with a pair of boots like that.”

Remus raises his eyebrows, vaguely impressed, and points one toe to examine it with self-indulgent drama. “There’s a difference between a gift and a lifestyle, you know.”

“Whose ‘lifestyle’ paid for them then?” Sirius tries not to admit to himself that he’s gripping his cup so tightly and sets it down, smoothing his palms subtly over his trousers. Remus’ eyes flash with something that could be mirth from one angle and fury from another, but it passes too quickly for Sirius to divine it.

“The viscount.” Remus is still leaning back into his netted hands but Sirius understands the shape of tension in a man’s shoulders when he sees it no matter how well Remus can pass for aloof. “Dearborn, the one with the main estate on the hill.” 

Sirius eyes the boots along with Remus for a moment, admiration and distant envy curling around his bones at once with a grip he can’t quite construe as tender or not. They’re lovely boots at the same time Sirius knows he could easily outdo something as trivial as shoes, but the presence of them still twists its pricking fingers at his skin as it grips, grips, _grips._ Oh, he hasn’t been jealous of anything since he stood in Saint Paul’s three years ago and watched Lily Evans say _I Do_ to Fleamont Potter’s gorgeous rogue of a son—he can never have that, he can never have anything more than fucking for a couple nights in a row and hoping the other enjoys it half as much as he enjoys Sirius’ coin— 

 _Fuck._ The wine is strong. Sirius shakes his head with a sharp little toss and sighs lightly to himself as he rips his eyes away from Remus’ boots. “I’m glad his taste agrees with you.” Sirius’ voice is tight from within his skull and he hopes to God it isn’t so pale from the outside.

“That’s it?”

Remus is eyeing Sirius with a gaze that promises something unsaid and chaotic when Sirius looks up at him with a furrowed brow. “Is what it?”

Remus sits forward and tugs at one of Sirius’ bracers from across the table, boots back down to the floor so all Sirius can focus on are those golden eyes, wolf’s eyes, _that’s_ what it’s been since they first met—Remus, Romulus, wolf’s son with a wolf’s eyes and _Oh,_ Sirius’ insides twist in on themselves with anticipation when Remus shifts and the heel of his foot comes up to rest at the height of Sirius’ thigh beneath the table. “That’s all you have to say about my cracking good boots?”

Automatically, Sirius slides a hand up to Remus’ shin, intent on gently pushing his foot off to suggest they go to bed instead and stop all this ridiculous posturing, _Wine’s a friend of sorrow, /Water’s friend is glee,_ why the fuck has he got hymns in his head? It’s Christmas, sure, but that won’t do, won’t do to be thinking of other things when Remus unexpectedly leans into that touch—lets go of Sirius and moves back slightly but lets his hips tip up out of physical instinct Sirius knows by this point like some runic language, lips parting slightly; the leather is butter-soft under Sirius’ hand and he freezes it there as his mind stops as well and he veers to ask, stark, “What would you have me say of them?”

“Something nice.” Remus swallows around the minor tic of flustered energy but Sirius is on it like a hound on a scent to have discovered a situation in which Remus is the one being worked up at Sirius’ behest instead of the other way round. It does filthy things to Sirius’ pride, and he’s up from his bench immediately to make his careful way to Remus’ side of the table.

“Does Dearborn know you’re touting his gift at another client’s house outside the city?”

“They’re my boots, I’ll do with them as I please.” The haughtiness in Remus’ voice is betrayed by the flush starting at his collar where two of his buttons lie open for their nearness to the warmth of the fireplace, pink and vibrant as the heat alighting at the pit of Sirius’ gut. Remus has only come undone twice with Sirius in the entirety of his employ: once when Sirius couldn’t wait for sanity and fucked him without drawing the study’s shades first, and again when Sirius had taken his sweet time undressing Remus the first time they relocated to Sirius’ quarters—he had been near putty in Sirius’ hands by the Sirius finally undid his trousers, and it wasn’t but one stroke before the rent boy spilled with an unfettered cry that still makes Sirius’ knees weak to recall it in privacy.

Man alive, he wants to make Remus burst apart at his seams again. And it seems he’s found another direct route to that hallowed eden. 

Sirius kneels neatly before Remus, the rent boy still seated on the bench but turned now to face Sirius as he tracks the baron’s movement. Sirius hesitates for but a moment before he seizes every ounce of determination in him and places both hands on Remus’ ankles. “Would you please to remove them, by any chance?”

Remus whets his lips with a quick dart of his tongue that looks entirely unconscious and closes his palms around the back edge of his seat as though anchoring himself. “They’re extremely fitted. Assistance would make that much easier.” Sirius watches carefully as the young man’s eyes flicker quickly along Sirius’ face, the fire throwing shallow and quick-bodied shadows across his own features and making him look even more the picture of uncontrolled want.

“Of course.” Sirius slides one hand up the perfectly-polished stretch of Remus’ right shin to stop at his knee where the boot leg ends, strapped with a brass rondel and snug to perfection. “Any zippers, buckles, fastens?”

“Just a pull.”

Sirius places a feather-light hand on the outside of Remus’ thigh, feeling the warmth of his skin through his breeches. Compelled to worship that heat, sacred flame in some echoing temple deep in the tunnels of Sirius’ consciousness, Sirius leans in and presses a slow kiss to the inside bend of Remus’ knee. “But of course,” he speaks there, not looking up and deciding instead to spend several more deep kisses just above the edge of Remus’ bootstrap.

An airy sound trips out from Remus when Sirius grips him behind his shin with a possessive tug, and Sirius finally looks up in a slow, dragging gaze. Remus’ stare is pure kerosene when he meets it, shuddering gold flecked with that summer-green that routinely hides beneath his irises to only emerge when heated—snowfall stare, a stare like the forest outside; Remus has bitten down hard on his bottom lip, breathing hard through his nose, and he slides a hand into Sirius’ hair to strike Sirius’ insides with a hard mallet. Sirius stills and catalogues the rent boy’s body, hungry for signals on where to go next. His hips are canted forward with an obvious stiffening in his trousers and his knees spread readily, skin flushed, hand left on the bench white-knuckled with the intensity of being drawn-out.

“Yes?” Sirius’ murmur is dark and unhurried, a staggering opposite to the blinding drive within him to simply splay Remus out on the table and fuck him with the mad impulse presently making his fingers tremble slightly where they’ve stilled against Remus’ boots.

Remus swallows with high-throated labor and unconsciously tightens his grip on Sirius’ hair. “I’d like your mouth on me, milord.”

“We’re of the same mind then,” Sirius assures him, pausing to press another slow march of kisses against the inside of Remus’ other thigh—just high enough to tease at the mention of Remus’ desire but not nearly enough to give him any sort of release. “How do you like it?”

“What?”

Remus’ voice is distracted with desperation and Sirius genuinely smiles to himself at the bare humanity in that. “How do you like it best, in my mouth?”

Sirius hasn’t ever taken the time to ask Remus directly for his preference for they’ve never quite had the luxury of time for Sirius to think on specifics beyond sucking him off. But he finds in this moment that he wants to blind Remus with imploding pleasure, blind him like the wall of alders beyond the front door, and so he waits patiently through the few seconds it takes the rent boy to catch at his wherewithal as Sirius continues lazily mouthing at his legs.

“I—when you focus just under the tip,” Remus says haltingly, “put your tongue there and play at it with the flat.”

Sirius’ own pulse surges with the memories of Remus plying that same technique devilishly on his own sex, and he grips tightly at both of Remus’ booted calves in instinctual encouragement. “That can be arranged.”

Another helpless groan trembles in Remus’ chest as Sirius slides his left hand up the young man’s shin, up his thigh, narrowly avoiding the shape of his tenting trousers to skate the hem of his breeches and tug out the hem of his shirt so Sirius can feel the impossible warmth of his skin underneath. The flat of remus’ stomach trembles sweetly at the touch and he begins to pant, his hips twitching forward in unbidden need. Sirius kisses him slightly higher, only inches away from the fasten that would free Remus’ length from his trousers, and decides to remain where he is for a moment.

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Sirius Black.” Remus voice shakes like beckoning wind through naked branches and Sirius is utterly hot for it.

“With whom,” he growls against the delectable swell of Remus inner thigh, “you or your other clients?”

Remus tosses off a breathless little laugh and tosses his head back slightly, baring the golden column of his neck that Sirius suddenly wants to bite—to claim him, to mark him, to show any other onlookers that Sirius is the one who can do this to Remus; perhaps not the only one, but certainly one among the many. He’ll take whatever ground he can cover with this demigod, half-siren, sinful seraphim.

“I don’t give a fucking whit for any ‘other clients’ right now.” 

Sirius dares to hook two fingers over the hasp of Remus’ breeches and meets his stare from where he’s trailing a warm stripe of his tongue up the cloth itself, stopping but a breath away from Remus’ crotch to simply burn a look into the rent boy and whisper a half-wondrous “Don’t you now?”

“You make it very hard to think of anything besides the way you touch me.” Remus’ words are hitched and hoarse and holding more meaning than Sirius had been prepared to unpack in the simple moment of putting his mouth on, but then what had he been expecting from this holy wraith of pleasure? For what sort of revelations should he have been prepared to face with two weeks alone, in the quiet solitude of the strange, ancient magic beneath the bones of Colchester, with nothing but the air of the forest to feed them and their touch on one another to lend them breath, besides the magnificent weight of affection? Sirius gains his wind again after half a second of blank-mindedness and flexes his fingers posessively where they hold fast to Remus’ body.

“As I’ve always intended,” Sirius murmurs, his own voice darkened with the intensity of fresh blood, fresh wine, spilt down white linen and virile to stain it deeply. Remus says nothing in return beyond a ragged gasp as Sirius finally presses his lips to the straining front of the rent boy’s breeches, his body hot and already beginning to seep expectantly beneath the black woolen weave. 

They trade no further words for the subsequent handful of moments beyond that it takes for Remus to reach his limit. Sirius is moving to undo Remus’ trousers to draw him out in full and finally deliver him from the sweet torture of pressing through his clothes when Remus squeezes his fingers around Sirius’ hair with a stilling force and a sharp gasp. Sirius asks not after the motion for he knows the instinct of it all too well, the jerking tug behind one’s diaphragm and that suspended snap of arrival, barrelling like a pitched avalanche down the slope of one’s limit. He simply hums a hazed affirmative against Remus, flattening his tongue along the solidity over which he’s been tracing open kisses. He locks eyes with the rent boy as Remus looks down at him and comes hard, with a low and wounded groan that rings deeply of desperate relief. Sirius sees him through it with attentive touch and tongue alike, and pride unfurls through him in a rabid pace that feels much like what he believes true madness to be.

 _Let it be madness then,_ the devilish thought to himself as Sirius memorizes the taste and smell and look of Remus going to pieces by his direction. _Let it be so and I will tumble into the dark of it by your very breath._

—

_30 December, 1887_

The woods are deathly still in the early evening, such that Sirius feels out-of-place even here in the haven of the snow in his hunting whites.

Five days have passed now with the gentle current of closeness suffusing the lodge like warm candlelight. The moment at the dining table the other night had broken some unseen and yet-unfelt membrane between them to suddenly flood their togetherness with something more than just their bodies, a channel thrown open and stuck there to let in hints of true affection and wefts of deeper tenderness—Sirius had felt the shift first in the soft shudder that wracked him quietly when he pressed a kiss to Remus’ neck after fucking him into the carpet to a dizzying and bone-deep release; second in the way Remus had pulled his face up for a true kiss, spent kiss, twist of lips that spelled so clearly _I Feel All Of You_ into Sirius’ skin.

It’s new, and slightly terrifying. Sirius can hardly get enough of it.

The sun is almost completely tucked beyond the treeline, and Sirius prays distantly and dully for another deer to find its way into his line of sight. He breathes silent, hot breath onto his fingers to keep them from going rigid even in his fur-lined gloves, and stares into the seemingly-endless thicket of skinny alder trunks, those spindly spirits of Colchester who have watched over him for over seven years and will continue to do so as long as Sirius keeps returning here—back to this font of primal curiosity and angular belonging, a place where he can feel both perfectly peaceful and endlessly restless at once, though is that simply the duality of man? To feel whole and parted in the same breath?

Philosophy cuts itself short when Sirius freezes to hear a faint crush of some creature on the snowfall, silent enough but hitting home on Sirius’ ears. He looks slowly down the rifle stock through his crosshair and holds his breath, scanning intently for what he hopes is a doe—his breath catches when the animal comes into view.

A wolf, near as tall as Sirius or at the very least shoulder-height, stalks into the path of trees just ahead of him. Sirius has only ever heard the distant bay of wolves here and never seen one up close; spied their tracks in the mud or the snow some mornings, yes, but never up close like this. It seems not to notice him, and Sirius notices his sights tremble a bit as his pulse kicks up. Its fur moves like a blanket with each slow step the creature takes, mesmerizing and hulking, terrifying in a beautiful sort of way. Sirius can only stare as it comes nearer to pass in front of the hedge where Sirius has nestled himself, somehow not pissing his trousers to behold it and only watching, rapt, to witness such a mighty animal.

The wolf stops not four paces from Sirius, who still hasn’t lowered his rifle barrel but has near as much of a head to shoot now as he would pointing down God himself. It sits back on its haunches and throws its head back to howl a low, mournful howl, and Sirius is so suddenly overcome with unexpected emotion at the sound that he nearly drops his rifle. His eyes well up with unbidden tears that sting in the cold and trace his cheeks as they breach his lashes immediately, blinking, in awe of the rarity before him. Had he stumbled into some sort of rift in space? The beauty of this creature can’t possibly be of this plane. A ridiculous thought to think but Sirius thinks it nonetheless, not daring to move and swipe at his cheeks so he continues looking at this lonesome wolf, charcoal-black wolf, yellow eyes, Remus’ eyes, that same twist of sharp melancholy there beneath the gold.

 _How many lifetimes have you lived, Sirius?_ Asked a-bed last night in what Sirius had thought was the splendor of refraction but thinks now must be the fault of that wisping sorcery that lives in this place—undefined, shadowed, hidden beneath centuries of history happening in some strange twist of reality that he might never get to see in his lifetime.

 _Only the one, and how sweet it’s been lately,_ Sirius had crooned with rare humor. Remus was stoney-serious when he shook his head and traced a self-conscious pattern on Sirius’ chest.

 _Sometimes I dream. And it’s as though I’m truly somewhere else, in a different age or—or in a different body._ He had sighed, resigned to the explanation but not looking quite comfortable with it, and so Sirius had drawn him nearer. _But I’m always myself. I know that much._

 _I often dream of other places,_ Sirius’ murmur placed against Remus’ temple in camaraderie couched in a kiss. _Perhaps we drift from skin to skin, have you heard the legends from the Americas?_

Remus had smiled then and sat on Sirius’ hips, looking down at him as though he owned the world. _Tell me one._

Sirius mouth is dry as he runs those stories through his head again now in a ripping loop of recall as he stares at the wolf; pieces he’s heard from travelers who go across the Atlantic, tales of natives who could throw their spirit from animal to animal in those dense forests so very like this and yet still so far away from the pulse of Colchester. He knows it’s just a wolf. At his very core Sirius knows this animal is just a wolf, strange and magnificent to behold in these woods but simply a wolf—but his heart pulls with something that feels too close to homesickness to be simple coincidence. He is experiencing a moment of magic and he knows it with the same instinct that tells him he can never extricate his life from Remus’ again for as long as he lives.

The wolf remains sitting as though waiting for something for several long moments before it hefts itself into a stand again. Sirius licks slowly at the drip of sticky salt tears that have gathered at the corner of his mouth and that’s when he hears it, the far-distant whine and howl of another creature. The wolf before him whuffs into the air with a resolute sound and, tail up and waving like a beacon, bounds off into the murk of the woods as night falls. Sirius lowers his rifle once it’s out of sight and catches his breath, gasping slightly on the frigid air as his exhalations steam around him in billowing heaves. He has never before seen something so staggering in his life besides the angles of Remus’ body.

Sirius doesn’t even breathe at the thought that he could have shot the creature and had food and fur for months had he not been overcome in that moment. Had he done so, he would have likely been sick in the snow with aimless, echoing grief.

Dark is falling quickly and there are no deer to be found—skirting the area, Sirius is sure, for the threat of such massive predators passing through. Salt beef for supper again then, and into the next few days before Peter returns to ferry them back to London. _London._ Sirius doesn’t want to think about the city again until he absolutely has to, and as he trudges back to the lodge he tries not to remember what the Thames smells like or how the springtime stickiness will inevitably feel on the back of his neck.

The front door creaks slightly as he passes through it, and Sirius is greeted by the now-familiar sight of Remus wearing nothing but his dressing gown with a book in hand. He looks up to see Sirius’ arrival and frowns immediately; “You’ve been crying?”

“No.” The lie is easy and quick and comes out in half a breath, and Remus doesn’t believe it for a even a moment. He shuts the book but stays sitting curled on the armchair as he watches Sirius set to shaking snow from his legs by the door and peel off his hunting whites.

“Liar. What, did you see something torn apart out there?”

“I saw a wolf.” Sirius meets Remus’ eyes again as he pauses his movements, parka half-shucked and jaw clenched for some reason. “I’ve seen poor dead things out there before, don’t be silly. No. I saw a wolf.”

Remus unfolds one leg from his seat and holds the ankle still tucked under him with both hands, a comfortable position Sirius has seen him assume several times in their nearness. “Did it frighten you so badly?” 

Sirius shakes his head and removes the rest of his outerwear before he moves slowly to sit on the carpet beside Remus’ chair. Remus shifts to face him slightly in an unconsciously welcoming movement so inviting that Sirius’ heart quivers pleasantly in his chest. “I—it put me in a passion for some reason, to see one from so near.”

Both men are quiet for a long moment then as the fire hisses and crackles beside them. Sirius stares into it briefly before Remus’ fingers idly find the crown of his head in a calming rub and he closes his eyes for a brief moment of adoration. “I’ve seen them before,” Remus murmurs, “but only in those dreams I’ve told you about.”

Sirius holds onto the secret then that wants desperately to be told, _It had your eyes,_ and settles for a milder truth; “So have I.” He touches the back of Remus’ heel hanging by his hand with grounding warmth and takes a stilling breath. “I suppose I was overcome to find one in waking.”

Remus’ fingers pause as he hesitates slightly, a pause Sirius feels in his own breath as he holds onto the stillness at the back of his mind like flotsam in the wideness of the ocean. “I’ve found myself overcome by much in waking these days,” Remus finally murmurs. He resumes his ministrations as Sirius’ insides clench sweetly around the half-admission, perhaps as near as the rent boy might ever get to baring his deeper emotions.

Yes, Sirius thinks to himself, London can wait for the few days they’ve left on their own. The enigmatic togetherness he has here with Remus will remain no matter the future, but perhaps it will lose its clarity far away from Colchester. They will still dream similar dreams and dive into the same depths of bodily ecstasy with one another, but the peculiar magic of this place will certainly not go home with them in such full force. Sirius takes quiet solace in the fact that Remus seems to have a unique magic all his own, unflagging regardless of his location.

Sirius smiles ever so slightly to himself and leans back into Remus’ hand with his eyes closed, contentment like true peace, and surrenders to the present.

They will have to return in the summer.

**Author's Note:**

> Lol I made it into a series. I'm going pretty buck-wild with the magical realism in here because I was really taken by the idea of connecting their threads of existence somehow, I hope it comes across well enough!! Thank you for all your beautiful encouragement on the last installment, it made working on this one a real treat <3


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